he addressed Mrs. Arnold, who had gone to her daughter in New York, as "My Sweet Granny." With all despatch he finished up his report on foreign schools, and on May 22 sailed for the second time to America. His behavior as a grandfather was exemplary. When he was staying with his daughter at Stockbridge, he made a visit to the "dear baby" the first thing in the morning: "At that time she is lying awake in her little crib, enchanted to see visitors, and always receives me with a smile or two. The other day she snatched a five dollar note out of my hand, and waved it in triumph like a true little Yankee." Arnold's idea that the American has a turn for accumulating money was perhaps reënforced in the course of this summer by a three days' stay at the cottage of Mr. Carnegie and an inspection of his works at Pittsburg. He says nothing about the steel works, but reports that he made the "magnate" stop the team, when they were driving through the Alleghanies, while he got out and gathered rhododendrons. To Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff he writes: "You should read Carnegie's book Triumphant Democracy. He and most Americans are simply unaware that nothing in the book touches the capital defect of life over here: namely, that compared with life in England it is so uninteresting, so without savour and without depth." Arnold spent July and August in the Berkshires, and found

some pleasant things to say of the hills and the wild flowers, but by the end of August he was sighing for his home in Surrey and civilization: "The great relief will be to cease seeing the American newsTheir badness and ignobleness are

papers.
beyond belief."

To an American friend he wrote on January 29, 1887, some months after his return to England: "One should try to bring oneself to regard death as a quite natural event, and surely in the case of the old it is not difficult to do this. For my part, since I was sixty I have regarded each year, as it ended, as something to the good beyond what I could naturally have expected. This summer in America I began to think that my time was really coming to an end, I had so much pain in my chest, the sign of a malady which had suddenly struck down in middle life, long before they came to my present age, both my father and grandfather." The next year in April he was looking eagerly forward to a visit from his American granddaughter and her mother, and on the fourteenth of the month went to Liverpool to meet them. The family malady struck him down suddenly before the meeting took place. He died on the fifteenth of April, 1888, in his sixtysixth year. In his note-book under that date he had written: "Weep bitterly over the dead, as he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shalt not do him good, but hurt

thyself." He had also written in a sentence for the following Sunday: "When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest; and be comforted for him when his spirit is departed from him."

CHAPTER II

POEMS OF THE PERSONAL LIFE

"The fact is, however, that the state of mind expressed in many of the poems is one that is becoming more common." -Letters, I, 59.

A

RNOLD himself, in a much quoted letter to

his mother of June 5, 1869, made an extraordinarily high claim in behalf of his own poems. "They represent," he said, "on the whole, the main movement of mind in the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs." If Arnold had written an essay on his own poetry, it would probably have been an expansion of this passage.

As we look back now over the quarter of a century, or a little more, previous to 1869, "the main movement of mind” through the period is not difficult to trace. In all phases of human activity we discern the forward pressure of reason, flushed still with the excitement of the French Revolution, temporarily checked and thwarted in some quarters, but steadily besieging and undermining the position held by tradition, prescription, and the deep inarticulate powers of feeling. In the political field the Reform Bills, the Chartist Movement, the European revolutions of 1848 were signs of its advance. In science Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, was its most conspicuous monument. In religion and philosophy the Utilitarians, the Positivists, the "higher criticism" of the Bible, Strauss's Leben Jesu, 1835, and Renan's Vie de Jésus, 1863, were various manifestations of the same spirit. In literature the displacement of the romanticism of Godwin and Sir Walter Scott by the Victorian realism of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope attested the popularity of the desire to see the "facts of life." The main movement of mind, then, was democratic, scientific, critical, realistic-directed, in short, toward the extension of the sway of reason over all things.

Arnold's poems reflect that movement in a peculiarly fascinating because in an intimately personal way. The conflict of aristocratic with demo